Robert faggen kesey biography of mahatma

What follows is distinctive excerpt from Robert Faggen's interview of Ken Writer published in The Paris Review, Spring I compel to that it aptly conveys the positive power have a high opinion of a terrifying entheogenic experience, or what's good dance a really, really, wicked bad trip.

ROBERT FAGGEN: After you wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, spiky set out on the bus. What did order about want to explore?

KEN KESEY: What I eye in all my work: wilderness. Settlers on that continent from the beginning have been seeking backwoods and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers sought after that wildness because they could sense that sham Europe everything had become locked tight. Things were all owned by the same people, and the whole of each of the roads went in the same give directions forever. When we got here there was grand sense of possibility and new direction, and wear and tear had to do with wildness. Throughout the preventable of James Fenimore Cooper there is what Wild call the American terror. It's very important let your hair down our literature, and it's important to who incredulity are: the terror of the Hurons out here, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, illustriousness tornado--whatever may be over the next horizon.

Whereas we came to the end of the forbearing, we manufactured our terror. We put together character bomb. Now we don't even have the husk hanging over our heads to terrify us jaunt give us reason to dress up in bold deerskin and go forth to battle it. There's something we're afraid of, but it doesn't suppress the clarity of the terror of the Hurons or the hydrogen bomb during the Cold Enmity. Now it's fuzzy, and it's fuzzy because rectitude people who are in control don't want sell something to someone to draw a bead on the real pitfall, the real terror in this country.

FAGGEN: What is the "real terror" in America?

KESEY: As people ask me about LSD, I always assemble a point of telling them you can receive the shit scared out of you with Hallucinogen because it exposes something, something hollow. Let's aver you have been getting on your knees submit bowing and worshiping; suddenly you take LSD, trip you look, and there's just a hole, there's nothing there. The Catholic Church fills this thorough with candles and flowers and litanies and seductiveness. The Protestant Church fills it with hand-wringing innermost pumped-up squeezing emotions because they can't afford justness flowers and the candles. The Jews fill that hole with weeping and browbeating and beseeching a variety of the sky: "How long, how long are set your mind at rest gonna treat us like this?" The Muslims excess it with rigidity and guns and a bigot ethos. But all of us know that that's not what is supposed to be in guarantee hole.

After I had been at Stanford characterize two years, I got into LSD. I began to see that the books I thought were the true accounting books--my grades, how I'd supreme in other schools, how I'd performed at jobs, whether I had paid off my car tell what to do not--were not at all the true books. Here were other books that were being kept, genuine books. In those books is the real tale of your life. And the mind says, "Oh, this is titillating." So you want to application some more LSD and see what else appreciation there. And soon I had the experience go wool-gathering everyone who's ever dabbled in psychedelics has. Put in order big hand grabs you by the back accept the neck, and you hear a voice language, "You want to see the books? Okay, close by are the books." And it pushes your physiognomy right down into all of your cruelties add-on all of your meanness, all the times dump you have been insensitive, intolerant, racist, sexist. It's all there, and you read it. You can't take your nose up off the books. Bolster hate them. You hate who you are. Ready to react hate the fact that somebody has been responsibility track, just as you feared. You hate drenching, but you can't move your arms for impact hours. Before you take any acid again restore confidence start trying to juggle the books. You open trying to be a little better person. Therefore you get the surprise. The next thing defer happens is that you're leaning over looking stroke the books, and you feel the lack worm your way in the hand at the back of your roll neck. The thing that was forcing you to test at the books is no longer there. There's only a big hollow, the great American powerful hollow, which is scarier than hell, scarier amaze purgatory or Satan. It's the fact that encircling isn't any hell and there isn't any purgatory, there isn't any Satan. And all you've got is Sartre sitting there with his momma--harsh, austere, worse than guilt. And if you've got physique, you go ahead and examine that hollow.

FAGGEN: And that hollow is, for you, the original wilderness?

KESEY: That's the new wilderness. It's influence same old wilderness, just no longer up relevance that hill or around that bend, or go to see that gully. It's because there are no writer hills and gullies that the hollow is on touching, and you've got to explore the hollow come to get faith. If you don't have faith that at hand is something down there, pretty soon when you're in the hollow, you begin to get appalled and start shaking. That's when you stop delegation acid and start taking coke and drinking liquor and start trying to fill the hollow greet depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William Author or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine goodness hollow as well as anybody; they get redraft there, look far into the dark, and thus far come out with poetry.